Email Marketing is the key to turning a one-time visitor to your web site into a long term customer.
It gives you the opportunity to develop the first contact into a fully fledged relationship, and along the way to demonstrate the value in the information and services that you have on offer.
The most successful sites on the net (Facebook, Amazon, eBay, MySpace to name a few) make good use of internet marketing to keep people coming back time and again to their sites. And you will too if you want your web business to prosper. There is not really a major alternative system available to generate repeat business on the internet.
Email Marketing System Options
Options available to the email marketer include:
- Email clients such as Outlook
- Hosted email marketing solutions
- Desktop email marketing solutions
- Email marketing integrated with your web site
- Customer Relationship Management
- Fully Managed email solutions
The most critical considerations when planning the email campaign are the source of your prospects, or list, and the nature of your communications.
Your Marketing List
Usually the most effective option is to build your list with a well crafted and attractive opt-in offer, allowing you to capture the details of interested people via your web site. You can see that having optimised the web site for the right kind of traffic in advance of this will determine whether you will have a good level of interest, and opt-ins to your marketing. Building your own list means that everyone on it has actually chosen to hear from you, their search is targeted to what you offer, and you have taken the first step towards answering their question, and demonstrating your credibility as a potential trusted supplier.
But it takes time.
If you don't have time then you must buy a list. There are a large number of list brokers of varying quality, and the response rate from a bought list will typically be far lower that from your own opt-in list.
Legal Considerations
Email marketing when done badly can be very annoying, as the Spam that many of us recieve will attest. So a strong legal framework has built up around the proper actions to take during your marketing campaign. Providing the proper terms and conditions when people opt in, a privacy policy, correct unsubscribe functionality (and honouring your unsubscribes) are some of the most basic considerations.
Email Formatting
Many emails are sent as plain text (no images), while the alternative is the fully formatted HTML version which brings web site style images and formatting with the email. This can look very good but may also have fomatting difficulties, so it is important that the email template is well designed. Email design (although HTML) works slightly differently to web site design - and if you get it wrong the display of your HTML email can be disastrous.
MIME Multipart is the format that includes both text and HTML, and is smart enough to recognise which type of email the recipient wants - and give it to them.
Email Copy Writing
The best emails are written to encourage the recipient to come back to your web site. It is important that the email is not too long, and to ensure that the offer is compelling and appropriate to the user. Ideally it will correspond closely to what they originally subscribed for, so you are continung to deliver, and over-deliver what they wanted in the first place.
Other useful considerations in copy writing are to use their name to perasonally address the recipient, which can make a remarkable difference to the successs rate of your campaign.
Other Email Marketing Terms
Autoresponders - a system that automatically responds to your users at pre-defined intervals, saving you work and implementing the mechanics of your campaign even when you are doing other things.
List Hygiene - the process of keeping your list accurate and up to date. If your campaigns send to a large number of non-addresses not only are you clogging up your own and everyone else's servers with useless traffic, but you can also be marked up as a spammer.
Deliverability - with Spam being a major problem a variety of systems have evolved to trap and prevent it. It is inevitable that a propoertion of legitimate messages also get trapped by the spam filters, so it is essential that your campaign is structured to provide maximum deliverability. When you use a hosted solution this is taken care of by the provider, but shoudl you implement your own system then you will need either to consider "whitelisting" or "accredditation", or just accepting that a proportion of your messages will not make it through.
Integration - the pre-requisite for success
The most important aspect of an email campaign is that is integrated well into the rest of your on-line marketing effort. The process begins with a person types one of your target search phrases into their search engine, and ends with a successful long term customer relationship.
Email marketing needs to be a seamless part of this process, and at Channel Computing we aim to help you implement and use the appropriate system to your level of skills, your market, the size of your list, technical infrastructure, and budget.
